TRIVANDRUM, 30 October 2006 — A 26-year-old computer hardware instructor in the Kerala port city of Cochin has admitted to sending e-mails threatening Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam to seek revenge against a girl who scorned him.
Akbar Raj, a computer hardware diploma holder, sent Thursday e-mail messages to 40 top police officers and the home secretary, saying Manmohan will be assassinated Wednesday when he visits the state and Kalam before his 76th birthday. He was detained by the police Saturday evening.
A coded line at the end of the message that contained the short forms of the college she attended, her date of birth and the PIN code of her village helped the police to trace the sender.
“He has been sending such malicious messages to the girl, an engineering graduate, and others known to her ever since the two fell apart. It was easy to trace the source of the message since she was the only girl from the village who attended the city college,” Kerala police chief Raman Shrivastava told reporters here.
Syed Alavi, father of Raj, said his son was undergoing psychological counseling at a city hospital after the breakdown of the relationship. Both families had to intervene to settle some financial dealings between the two and the boy has been behaving abnormally ever since.
“He has no connection with any religious or extremist organizations and he is not religious at all,” Alavi, a retired government employee, said. Police also confirmed that he had no connections with any extremist organization.
At a hurriedly called news conference, Home Minister K. Balakrishnan warned the public against a campaign targeting Muslims over the incident. “There was a similar attempt when letter bombs exploded ahead of Kalam’s visit to the state recently. Extremists are in all communities but using such incidents to target a particular community would do only harm to the state,” he said.
